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The Park Where Conservation and Indigenous Rights Go Hand in Hand
Cesar Lopez Tanchiva strolls through the tropical rainforest with a sure-footedness that comes with decades of experience. Despite his authoritative appearance — a prim, khaki uniform and tall, jade green boots — the 37-year-old grew up here in the jungle.
But since 2013, Tanchiva has taken on a new role as a state-sanctioned protector of his home, the Cordillera Azul, a densely forested national park in eastern Peru on the edge of the Amazon. He coordinates a team of 20 Indigenous rangers from the village of Yamino who patrol their community’s 112 square miles of protected land.
Cesar Lopez Tanchiva. Credit: Peter Yeung
“We have created a new kind of vigilance in our society,” says Tanchiva, whose team is equipped with GPS trackers, video cameras and drones to ward off against illegal loggers, miners and narcotraffickers in the territory. “We are able to use these new technologies as well as our knowledge that we have learned over many generations.”
This initiative in the Cordillera Azul — which is run by the Center for Conservation, Research and Management of Natural Areas (CIMA), a Peruvian nonprofit — is part of an effort to forge a new model of conservation that treats the well-being of local communities as a fundamental element of, and objective for, its long-term success.
Credit: Peter Yeung
Rangers in the Yamino community are combining new technology and knowledge passed down over generations to protect their land.
Created in 2001, the national park spans more than 5,000 square miles of land that is filled with great biodiversity — including 71 species of large mammals, 10 species of primates and 516 species of birds. It’s circled by a buffer zone that contains 300,000 people across 530 communities, many of whom are Indigenous.
So when CIMA was tasked by the government to manage the park, which has come under threat from illegal miners, loggers, and cartels cultivating coca leaves to make and export cocaine, it saw those communities as a help and not a hindrance.
“The Indigenous people living in the Cordillera Azul are our partners,” says Juan Batiston Flores Fabian, the regional coordinator for CIMA. “We are working towards the same goals as them: to protect and preserve this beautiful environment.”
Yamino women wearing traditional Cacataibo clothes. Credit: Peter Yeung
The project marks a breakaway from so-called “fortress conservation” — a model pioneered in the US and taken up by Western organizations across the world that envisions nature as separate from people, penalizing those living in and around it.
“There’s a dispute over its origins, but the best evidence suggests it is an American idea,” says Colin Luoma, a lecturer in law at London’s Brunel University and author of a book on fortress conservation. “It came from the creation of national parks, with the idea that they are pristine, unoccupied landscapes that must be kept peopleless.”
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Luoma cites the early examples of Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, whose establishment in the late 19th century led to the “forced expulsion” of native people. More recently, a slew of human rights abuses have been perpetrated by conservation groups in African parks. It’s a legacy that stretches far and wide: According to analysis published in 2020, over 250,000 people from 15 countries were forced from their homes in protected areas between 1990 and 2014, with one billion people affected by the conflicts.
“Fortress conservation became the dominant way that conservation organizations understood how to protect nature,” says Luoma.
A traditional Cacataibo headdress. Credit: Peter Yeung
But in the Cordillera Azul, the conservation efforts are now working for, not against, Indigenous rights.
In 2008, after CIMA won a contract to run the national park, it began developing a quality of life plan for the local Cacataibo Indigenous tribe over the next five years, spanning economic, social, cultural, political and environmental objectives.
The wide-ranging targets included installing garbage cans in all homes, planting of fruit trees like lemon and mango for self-consumption and sale, the creation of an aquaculture-based fish farm, as well as encouraging the holding of democratic elections and maintaining the use of traditional clothing and cultural practices.
A traditional Cacataibo thatched roof. Credit: Peter Yeung
“The main goals were to improve the living conditions of the community and to stop deforestation in the area,” adds Batiston. “That is being achieved through sustainable management of land and of the natural resources. Both can be achieved together.”
Participatory mapping was carried out by CIMA and the Cacataibo to identify the exact boundaries of their land and to assess what resources could be sustainably cultivated by the roughly 60 Indigenous families in the community of Yamino.
Credit: Peter Yeung
The community is in the process of building ecotourism infrastructure, which will provide another stream of income.
Certain areas of the forest within the buffer zone are now dedicated to agroforestry-based cultivation of cacao and plantains, bringing in a steady income, while other areas are monitored and defended by the Indigenous forest rangers. Sometimes, the rangers still encounter coca growers, and are forced to report them to the police.
“Before, there were many cocaleras,” says Claudio Pérez Odicio, president of the community in Yamino and one of the main figures involved in the participatory mapping. “We have taken our land back over time. But the battle continues.”
A woman artisan at work. Credit: Peter Yeung
Beyond forest monitoring and agroforestry, the community is also in the process of building ecotourism infrastructure to provide another income stream and has also supported the women artisans to create traditional Cacataibo textiles.
“We learned from our mothers and grandmothers,” says Clementina Estrella Odicio, 41, who is a member of the Association of Artisan Mothers of Yamino. “They taught us the designs. We are happy to continue the tradition and to wear the same clothes.”
A necklace made from the bright red seeds of the huayruro plant. Credit: Peter Yeung
The association produces handmade cotton fabrics that have been dyed with the bark of mahogany trees and painted using mud from the forest with designs such as snake skin, rivers, hills and fish scales, depicting the Cacataibo’s Amazonian culture. The women also make jewelry with the bright red seeds of the huayruro plant (Ormosia amazonica).
In 2021, the community signed an agreement with the National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State (Sernanp) to produce artisanal products sourced from the forest under an “Allies for Conservation” brand — as the products are now labeled — in order to raise awareness of the project and products and expand the size of the market.
Credit: Peter Yeung
“We learned from our mothers and grandmothers. We are happy to continue the tradition and to wear the same clothes.”
“We are learning how to manage our resources,” says Bellamira Perez, the former president and current treasurer of the women’s association. “That’s the objective for us. We don’t cut trees if we don’t have to. We only take what has already fallen.”
A huge breadth of research has shown the effectiveness of empowering Indigenous and local communities to protect and manage natural resources. The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group found that community-managed forests are more effective in reducing deforestation than standard protected areas, and that in Latin America, Indigenous areas are “almost twice as effective” as any other protection. Separate research published in April found secondary forest coverage on previously deforested lands in the Brazilian Amazon grew by five percent in Indigenous territories between 1986 and 2019 — 23 percent more growth than directly outside those areas.
Bellamira Perez. Credit: Peter Yeung
“There is less deforestation and biodiversity loss on Indigenous-owned lands,” says Luoma. “That’s a fact and the evidence to prove that is growing.”
Implementing an effective model to more broadly protect the world’s rainforests, which play a key role in maintaining the planet’s climatic balance, will be crucial as pressures ramp up. The tropics lost 4.1 million hectares in 2022, the equivalent of losing 11 football fields of forest per minute, a 10 percent rise compared with 2021.
Ecotourism huts in the Yamino community. Credit: Peter Yeung
Peru, which is home to 55 Indigenous groups, contains the second-largest area of the Amazon rainforest, after only Brazil — covering nearly 60 percent of the country.
But Luoma warns that there is still a long way to go before the “rights-respecting” approach to conservation is properly implemented. Often agencies that are supposed to be working with local communities do what they think is best for nature, he argues, rather than genuinely taking into account the desires of those local communities.
Clementina Estrella Odicio. Credit: Peter Yeung
“The danger is that support for Indigenous communities becomes performative,” says Luoma. “And there’s the risk of a power differential between the organization and the community. In reality, Indigenous people must be leading the project.”
Yet in the Cordillera Azul, over two decades of efforts have built a solid foundation for an Indigenous-first model of conservation that has already borne many fruits.
“It interests me to conserve the forest,” says Clementina Estrella Odicio, who in 2020 also became the first female park ranger in the community. “I want to be involved.”
The post The Park Where Conservation and Indigenous Rights Go Hand in Hand appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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A Carnegie Hall Concert Series Designed for Mental Health
Imagine you go to a concert at the esteemed Carnegie Hall in New York. Instead of sitting in a chair, you are invited to make yourself comfortable on soft floor cushions or a yoga mat. Rather than being shushed, you are encouraged to connect with your neighbor. And at the moment when the first musical notes would normally sound, a host invites you to breathe in and out mindfully. Even the lighting is softer and warmer.
“We hung fabric to make the space more inviting and cozy,” says Sarah Johnson, director of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute (WMI). “Given everything that people are navigating in today’s world, we wanted to intentionally craft a communal musical experience to maximize the health benefits of attending a performance.”
Premiering earlier this month, Carnegie Hall’s ongoing series of 16 Well-Being Concerts isn’t only designed to entertain — it aims to deliver tangible health benefits. According to a sweeping 2019 World Health Organization report, making and listening to music is associated with reduced stress, anxiety and loneliness.
“We’re trying to really hold the space for the audience to have as fruitful of an experience as possible during the concert. It’s a really cool way to dig into the meaning of the content.” Credit: Fadi Kheir
The report — along with findings that a significant percentage of Americans who suffer from anxiety and depression don’t receive adequate care — inspired the series of performances. Some are open to the general public, while others are curated for specific audiences such as health care workers, veterans or people impacted by the justice system.
“We started to wonder, what could we do?” Johnson says of the series’ genesis. “How could we create an opportunity for people to maximize the potential well-being impact of a live musical experience?”
When vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles starts singing the first tunes of “Conscious Mind,” some listeners close their eyes to focus on her crystal clear, soulful voice. “Love the world” is the refrain. Charles and her husband, pianist Jarrett Cherner, finished writing their album Tone during the pandemic. “Trying to cultivate loving kindness and mindfulness during these trying times,” Charles remembers. “And then sharing that loving kindness outward into the world. We could never have known at the time how well it would fit into this space now.”
Use the player above to experience a Well-Being Concert curated with music from the artists in the series.
Both the artists and the attendees say they experience the Well-Being Concerts quite differently from your typical performance. Instead of watching the artists on an elevated stage, the attendees are on the same level and form a circle around the performers. “It feels much more connected,” is how Charles describes the difference. “We’re trying to really hold the space for the audience to have as fruitful of an experience as possible during the concert. It’s a really cool way to dig into the meaning of the content.”
Carnegie Hall piloted the Well-Being Concerts this spring mainly for health care providers and people impacted by the justice system. The response was so enthusiastic that the Weill Institute expanded the series for this season.
“As soon as I walked into the room, I felt my heart rate going down,” one attendee noted after a performance. “I felt my breathing coming back. And it just continued throughout the event.” Credit: Fadi Kheir
It hosted the first Well-Being Concert of this season on November 11 for health care workers at New York City’s public hospitals, because of the “acute challenge for the health care world in the last few years,” Johnson explains. “We’ve all been so fragmented and pulled in a million directions, the events are meant to offer relief.” The audience was capped at 100 people to create a sense of intimacy.
Both Johnson and strategic advisor Ian Koebner take care not to stigmatize or exclude any attendees. “We take an expansive approach because we’re all swimming in very stressful, isolating waters, and we can all stand to be supported more deeply,” says Koebner, who also hosted the first Well-Being Concert. At the beginning, he invites the audience to breathe mindfully and introduces a very simple form of mindfulness meditation, though he avoids using the word meditation so as to not feed into any preconceived notions.
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“As soon as I walked into the room, I felt my heart rate going down,“ one attendee noted after a performance. “I felt my breathing coming back. And it just continued throughout the event…When I left, there out on the street, everything was a bit brighter and calmer and nicer.”
One nurse said after the event, “I wasn’t aware it was possible to be in a space that felt so peaceful in this city.”
Carnegie’s series isn’t the first to address mental health through performance. The United Kingdom pioneered a program called Arts on Prescription as psychosocial support for patients experiencing loneliness or social isolation. The program has run for more than two decades and shows benefits for mental health, chronic pain and the management of acute and chronic illnesses.
“Arts in general, and music in particular, can be very therapeutic,” Koebner says. “Reflective group listening in a concert setting can have a positive physiological, psychological and social impact. For instance, the stress hormone cortisol decreases. Researchers have measured a decrease in anxiety and depression.”
“The programs have an effect on us as well,” says the organizer. “We who do this work are changed by it, too.” Credit: Fadi Kheir
Koebner worked for ten years in arts-based conflict resolution before joining Carnegie Hall. A licensed acupuncturist, he has a PhD in healthcare leadership from UC Davis, where he was also the director of integrative pain medicine. This career path led him to wanting to “be a partner in addressing the burden of chronic pain and loneliness.” He quotes studies that found listening to music can “reduce symptoms of depression, increase well-being through the creation of social connection and provide an important resource for self-development, recovery and quality of life among individuals with long-term illnesses.”
The concert series is “an artistic exploration as well as a laboratory,” according to Koebner. Its impact will be evaluated in cooperation with The Berkeley Social Interaction Lab at UC Berkeley. Under the guidance of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, the researchers study the experience of live concerts with a randomized controlled trial about the impact of the season.
The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall has more than 14 years of experience with presenting concerts in diverse and often high-stress public spaces, including hospitals, senior care residences and schools, as well as with people experiencing homelessness. “We want to think about how to support well-being concerts outside of the very kind of rarefied air of Carnegie Hall,” Koebner says.
For instance, the WMI has been offering a program called Musical Connections in maximum-security correctional facilities like Sing Sing. Sarah Elizabeth Charles has served as a vocal coach for women at New York’s jail on Rikers Island as part of the Weill Institute’s Lullaby Project, writing lullabies with and for young mothers. Charles calls the experience of bringing her music into prisons “life-changing.” The Lullaby Project explores what role music can play in mitigating stress for expecting families and new parents, proving that music “can spur language development and moderate stress.” It also helped Charles work through her own miscarriage and pregnancy.
“The programs have an effect on us as well,” Johnson says. “I found the concert really helpful to me personally. It was quite peaceful, lovely and contemplative. We who do this work are changed by it, too. With this work, there is the potential for 360 degrees of impact.”
The response to the first Well-Being Concerts has been encouraging, but the organizers know that mental health challenges are rarely resolved with one performance.
“The concert felt very healing,” one attendee said after one of the pilot concerts in spring. “But I’m very aware that I am now going back out onto the streets of Gotham.”
Johnson’s team is looking into ways to prolong the impact. “How do you extend the impact of a single event?” Koebner asks. He is helping to create resources for the audience –– for instance, curated playlists attendees can download, and short recording snippets of the concert that he sends out for several weeks afterward to prolong the impact.
At the end of the concert, Charles and Cherner invite the audience to sing along and lead the room in lyrics that could hardly be more fitting: “Be here and now, living life out loud.”
The post A Carnegie Hall Concert Series Designed for Mental Health appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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My Body is a Bouquet
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Meet the Anti-Fracking Nanas
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AI Is Helping Indigenous Teens in Brazil Keep Their Mother Tongue Alive
Huddled in small groups around laptops, 20 Brazilian teenagers — a group including TikTok influencers and gamers — are using an app to build a skill that’s vital to the future of their entire community.
The teenagers belong to the Guarani Indigenous people, based in a community two hours from São Paulo, and they are fluent in speaking both Portuguese and their mother tongue, Guarani Mbya. But when it comes to writing, they often default to Portuguese as that’s what they were first taught to write in, putting the Guarani Mbya language in its written form at risk of disappearing.
But since March of this year, they’ve been using an app to improve their ability to write in Guarani Mbya. The “Linguistic Assistant” app works like the autocorrect and text suggestion feature on cell phones to help them build on the sentences they start writing themselves.
Guarani students are learning how to write in their native language from the app. Courtesy of IBM
The app is part of a project funded by IBM to create AI tools to help preserve and expand the use of Indigenous languages in Brazil. The students — who make up the sole high school class across seven villages of around 3,000 people, on a reservation of 23,000 square miles — were nominated by their wider community to be the focus of IBM’s AI for Indigenous languages social impact work in their region.
The results so far are promising, according to Dr. Claudio Pinhanez, an AI specialist at IBM and visiting professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), who is leading the project. “By the end of the semester, we saw they were starting to write longer sentences on their own in their language. The progress they were making is amazing,” he says.
Digital empowerment for vulnerable languages
Guarani Mbya is one of 202 Indigenous languages spoken in Brazil, with 190 of them considered at risk of dying out — and 22 already have. With around 17,000 speakers, Guarani Mbya is classified by UNESCO as a vulnerable language, meaning that while it’s widely spoken, its use is restricted to certain domains, for example, like the home, or with certain family members.
Of the 7,000 or so languages that exist in the world, about a fifth are thought to be endangered, with the United Nations estimating that half of these will be extinct or close to it by 2100 — the majority being Indigenous languages. Hence it’s declared 2022 to 2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, to help increase resources, support and awareness for their protection, recognizing in particular the role technology has to play in what it calls “digital empowerment.”
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The movement to prevent Indigenous languages from disappearing has prompted a number of tech-centric language preservation and expansion projects like the one Dr. Pinhanez is leading at IBM and USP. For example, in Australia, where First Nations people speak more than 250 Indigenous languages, the University of Melbourne has launched its 50 Words project, an interactive language map that aims to offer at least 50 words of each Australian Indigenous language, as part of a nationwide Indigenous language preservation movement.
In neighboring New Zealand, nonprofit media organization Te Hiku has developed an app to collect oral recordings of Indigenous languages across the region, to help speakers boost their everyday use of their native language. And recognizing, as the Guarani people have, that the written form of a language can be challenging and equally important to preserve, a type foundry worked closely with Indigenous communities in Canada to develop new typefaces that make it easier for them to express themselves in writing.
Buoyed by how the Guarani teens have embraced technology to improve their written native language skills, Dr. Pinhanez and his team now plan to evolve the chatbot from a desktop app to one that can be downloaded to a cell phone, which will look and feel like WhatsApp.
After one semester, students were starting to write longer sentences on their own in their language. Courtesy of IBM
“[The teens] see writing as a way to integrate their many communities, and to be able to tell their own stories in a way that is more stable than just speech. The community told us their youth were very interested in computers and engaged in social media, but needed to improve their native language writing, and that’s where they want us to help,” says Dr. Pinhanez.
He and his team are also keen to offer the tool as a free resource to other Indigenous communities, emphasizing that this is a strictly nonprofit initiative.
Embracing technology while protecting culture
With projects like these, there are two key considerations that are inherently linked: the importance of co-developing and co-designing AI tools and frameworks with Indigenous communities, and the need to train Indigenous people in coding and development. Doing so gives them real stewardship of such projects, as Dr. Pinhanez outlined in a recent paper he co-authored.
But embracing technology and the desire to protect culture and language are often at odds in Indigenous communities, as Dr. Drea Burbank has observed. Dr. Burbank grew up on Nez Perce lands in Idaho, is trained in Indigenous health and had a nine-year career as a firefighter working closely with Indigenous communities in the US and Canada.
She is now the founder and CEO of Savimbo, an organization which helps Indigenous small farmers and Indigenous communities in the Amazon sell carbon and biodiversity credits. Savimbo also supports them with land rights, literacy and bank accounts. Dr. Burbank has been based near the town of Villagarzon in Colombia since May 2022.
“A minority group that’s fighting to preserve a counterculture will create walls around the culture to try not to dilute it, because the majority culture is automatically going to wipe that culture out,” says Dr. Burbank.
While many of the Indigenous communities Dr. Burbank works with feel technology could contribute to that dilution, she believes it can benefit Indigenous communities. For example, she is looking specifically for partners to help create banking interfaces in Indigenous languages, powered by voice recognition passwords. She’s concerned, though, that a lack of tech savviness would hamper these communities’ ability to properly consent to and govern the use of AI language tools.
The teens “see writing as a way to integrate their many communities, and to be able to tell their own stories in a way that is more stable than just speech,” according to Dr. Pinhanez. Courtesy of IBM
“We’re talking about communities where even turning on an iPhone or writing a password is a barrier. It’s very difficult for them to give informed consent for novel technologies,” says Dr. Burbank.
That’s why José Alberto Garreta Jansasoy, Governor of the Cofán Indigenous Reservation in Colombia and a Savimbo advisor, would like technology to come with wider strategies to support the communities more holistically. He believes videos could be a helpful resource for teaching the Cofán language to young people, as it’s currently not widely spoken. He would also like to see resources allocated to Cofán language-specific schools.
“Spanish is more commonly practiced for better communication with outsiders, which has led to the unfortunate consequence of gradually abandoning our native language. Fortunately, we have realized this and are working to reclaim our language,” says Jansasoy.
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Fellow Savimbo advisor Ramón Uboñe Gaba Caiga, a community leader in the Waorani tribe in Ecuador, feels optimistic that AI tools for preserving Indigenous languages can have the double benefit of expanding environmental and sustainability knowledge, as so much of that is tied into the language.
“It is very important today that young people can have a digital file where they can know the reality of us, and how we protect biodiversity, territory education and health, to have this information as a database for future generations,” says Gaba Caiga, who speaks Wao Terero, which is only spoken by about 5,000 people.
Reciprocal benefits to AI
Indigenous languages can also help to develop AI further, as Dr. Pinhanez points out. Large language models like ChatGPT have not necessarily been trained ethically, having been fed novels and texts without permission from the authors. Since Indigenous communities would need to actively provide texts and consent to their use, working with them could help to change the status quo when it comes to AI practices. And as Indigenous societies’ belief and reasoning systems differ dramatically from Western cultures, using more of them as stimulus for AI models would help remove some of the limits they currently face when it comes to how reasonable and wide-ranging their responses are.
As Dr. Pinhanez writes: “Documentation and vitalization of Indigenous languages has this unique quality of pushing AI to be better in terms of technology and ethics at the same time.”
The post AI Is Helping Indigenous Teens in Brazil Keep Their Mother Tongue Alive appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.